7 years ago - 36-year-old Will attempts to build Plutonium Man. The Metal Men are destroyed stopping him. He has a breakdown at the loss, and has to start taking prozac, which limits his creativity while he finds work in a government lab.

5 years ago - 38-year-old Will is assisted by Vic Stone in revitalizing his Metal Men programming and rebuild them. T.O. Morrow tries to recruit him to his private island think tank.

4 years ago - 39-year-old Will defeats T.O. Morrow & recovers his resources, setting up his own island laboratories.

​1 year ago - 42-year-old Will repairs Cliff Steele after he is damaged during the battle against Maggeddon. He remains on the island to lead the Metal Men.

The Metal Men are a constant presence on the outskirts of DC Continuity. they're instantly recognizable as a Bob Haney creation, with the same cartoon logic that has always been the strength of his work. Because they're never HUGELY popular, they've been re-imagined dozens of times, from the specific relationship between the various android members of the team to the specific nature of their technology. At times, they've even been written as human characters that have had their minds loaded into android bodies.

We prefer them as pure androids. The responsometer is a massive innovation in the development of artificial intelligence, but we also like the idea that the actual personality of each android is actually affected by the qualities of the material the android is built with. There have been a LOT of stories that try to deconstruct the simple premise of the team, but the Metal Men are at their best when you just let them be.

Magnus, on the other hand, is a fun character to play with. His brilliance, obviously, but also his fragility. He was depicted in the series 52 as being pretty lost without his creations, having to take prozac to function. We've worked elements of that into his story, but also given him quite a payoff: making him the ultimate owner of his own island research facility. This sort of small paradise is just the sort of place this odd little family should be.